2017-09-21

There is a blood donation event on the campus, today and yesterday, as you can probably guess from the dates on the...


There is a blood donation event on the campus, today and yesterday, as you can probably guess from the dates on the sign. But you will also notice that this is neither the third nor the fourth week this year. And you are right.

"W3-W4" is anglicised Chinese. Weekdays in Chinese do not have names similar to English or other languages, but instead can be literally translated as "week one" (Monday, 禮拜一, 週一), "week two" (Tuesday, 禮拜二, 週二) etc. Only exception is Sunday, which is not "week seven" but "week sun" or "week sky".

So, what happened here? Someone wanted to express that these two days are Wednesday and Thursday, took the Chinese short form and created a literal English short form of it - which would have a completely different meaning in English.

I wonder how many Taiwanese understand W3/W4...

2 comments:

R Prakash Prakash said...

Those letters or words are mind boggling

Olaf Fichtner said...

R Prakash Prakash the real fun starts when you notice that horizontal text in Chinese can be written LTR or RTL... Or you see Chinese RTL text with some names in Latin script, of course written LTR...